What is Engagement Value and how to use it

When defining engagement, some might naturally think it means the number of page views or the amount of time someone spends on your website. While those are types of engagement, they’re not necessarily helping you deliver on the higher-level business objectives keeping your boss awake at night.

Engagement Value is just what it sounds like — a way of measuring how your visitors’ interactions deliver against the specific goals your business cares about most. If your most significant strategic objective is to increase revenue, what should your marketing objectives be to support that goal? In this case, acquiring leads and contact acquisitions would be important, because more leads mean more customers and, ultimately, more revenue for your company.

But beyond basic acquisition, you’ll also want to gain more intelligence about your customers’ different behaviors. Better-quality data will help you understand who your customers are, which will help you distinguish hot leads from cold ones and enable you to more effectively market to the specific needs of each.

So you’ve identified what your overall strategic objectives are and funneled those down to your marketing objectives. Great! Now it’s time to turn those into some specific digital goals. If your focus is acquiring more contacts or increasing leads, what do you need to measure from a digital point of view to determine if you’re succeeding?

In this scenario, it could be a form that visitors complete to sign up for a newsletter or request a call. Both of those goals drive your original marketing objective of contact acquisition, which will in turn increase revenue.

This is an example of one goal. You’ll likely identify a number of different digital goals that will help support your organization’s overall strategic objectives.

While all goals are important, they’re not all of equal importance. For example, is the value of a newsletter signup the same as the value of a request for a call? The call request shows a level of eagerness to learn more about your organization and could convert a lead into a customer more quickly. A customer means revenue — and more revenue is your business’ main strategic objective. Thus, in this case, the call request would rate higher on the value scale than the newsletter signup.

By creating your own Engagement Value Scale, you can look at your data and begin to correlate the different weightings with the digital goals you’ve identified. Imagine you have 100 signups for “request a call.” Out of those 100, 10 end up becoming customers. Now compare that to “sign up for a newsletter,” where out of 100 signups, only one becomes a customer. If you’ve decided that “request a call” is 10 times more important than “sign up for a newsletter” on your Engagement Value Scale, then the difference between them is a factor of 1:10.

Effectively, you’re building an Engagement Value Scale that correlates to your strategic objective of increasing revenue. Once you have your Engagement Value Scale set up, it’s a matter of using that insight to drive your decisions.

Once you begin to dive into digital analytics using Engagement Value, you’ll gain insights likely to reveal that some areas you thought were essential are actually areas where you’re not increasing value.

Let’s use an example: your marketing campaign succeeds at driving more site visits, but users are not converting on any significant digital goals. Since you’re not getting enough business value out of the marketing campaign driving those increased visits, you should optimize them. You can start by looking at the campaigns that bring more value.

On the other hand, you’re also likely to gain insights that reveal areas you had previously missed where real value is being added — areas where your campaigns are more effective at getting visitors to convert to the digital goals that matter to your business and increase revenue. You can use these insights to double down and drive more value to the business.

If you’ve created your Engagement Value Scale and you're ready to start using Engagement Value, there are several variables you can use to evaluate your progress. Here we'll look at evaluating campaigns, profiles, content, and channels.

To evaluate campaigns, look at your different marketing initiatives and understand which of those initiatives are most valuable for your organization.

To evaluate profiles, look at how engaged your individual visitors are. Have a lot of visitors who aren’t engaged? They represent a good opportunity for further optimization. Don’t miss your chance to serve these visitors a better experience. Try tweaking the way you address them to see what works.

When evaluating content, assess which content is very valuable versus content that has a lot of visits but doesn’t necessarily deliver the same amount of value.

Finally, you can evaluate channels by identifying not only those that drive visits to your website, but also those that drive valuable visits. Look at the channels that are most efficient in terms of value per visit — converting visits into your most critical digital goals — and see what you can learn from them.

Once you’re ready to start working with Engagement Value, you can leverage the different capabilities within Sitecore Experience Platform^TM to better understand what leads to value. An example is the Experience Profile. Sitecore captures the first anonymous interaction a visitor has with your brand, and then builds a robust profile off of it and every subsequent interaction. That information will help you better understand the different interactions visitors have with your brand.

For each individual Experience Profile, you can see the specific Engagement Value for actions and what the value per visit is. That information enables you to better optimize experiences and leverage highly engaged audiences versus those that are less engaged.

You may also choose to group different website pages according to visits and value points. Some pages might attract a lot of visits but aren’t effective at turning them into valuable leads that convert to your goals. Others might convert visitors to your goals but are less-trafficked pages, and others still might accomplish all of the above — what we call “hero” pages. Last but not least, there are pages that don’t attract many visits or bring tremendous value, but they may be necessary to the business.

You can use this information to better optimize groups of pages based on where the opportunities for improvement lie, with the ultimate goal of turning them all into hero pages.